Q+A: Bill English

One week left on the election campaign trail –
National Party leader Bill English

TVNZ’s
Corin Dann asked National Party leader Bill English on Q+A
this morning if he was running a “concerted scare
campaign” regarding Labour’s tax policy.

Mr English
responded saying “that’s what’s in the public’s
mind. The public want to know the answers to those questions
about how many taxes and when.

Labour keep changing their
mind. It’s absolutely legitimate. I mean, this is
real.”

“This is about cash in people’s pockets,
investment decisions, the decisions to employ another
person, what people can take home at the end of the week.
These are real things. It’s not just some hypothetical
argument,” says Mr English.

The party leader defended
National’s work on the condition of New Zealand waterways,
despite the suggestion farmers haven’t had to change their
behaviour under National’s watch.

“Well, that is
absolutely wrong. And the media who have been out on this
campaign have actually seen the distress among – not just
the farming community, but the horticulture people, all the
people who work in those industries – because there’s
been five or six years of intensive work.”, he
said.Q +
AEpisode
28BILL
ENGLISHInterviewed by Corin
Dann

CORIN Good morning to you,
National Party leader Bill
English.BILL Good
morning,
Corin.CORIN I
wonder if we could start with the economy. Can you guarantee
homeowners watching this morning that their interest rates
will not go up under a National government in the next three
years?BILL You
can’t guarantee it, but it’s less likely, because we
will be running the government’s books with less debt. We
will be dropping debt. CORIN So
it would not be unreasonable, for example, if I was to write
a story, to say National can’t rule out higher interest
rates in the next term of government? That would not be
unreasonable, would
it?BILL Well, we
can’t guarantee it. And I think everyone knows governments
can’t guarantee interest rates. But we can do our bit to
keep them lower for
longer.CORIN So
why is it that you’ve got a flyer going round in mailboxes
at the moment saying lower debt, lower interest rates, or
much higher debt and higher interest rates. It’s very
hypocritical, isn’t it, to suggest that under Labour,
they’ll have higher interest rates when you’re saying
yourself that you might have higher interest
rates?BILL Well,
according to their own plan, they will have considerably
higher debt. We believe it’ll be higher than they
say.CORIN High
enough to seriously influence interest rates? I mean,
they’re going to be two years slower than you to get to
20%. No market analyst thinks that 20% of GDP debt is
anything to worry
about.BILL Well,
it’s the change at the margin, right? So interest rates
are relatively low now. There’s absolute clarity that a
Labour government will be borrowing more. That’s even
before they have to negotiate with the Greens, who would
have them borrowing more and New Zealand
First.CORIN Soare yousaying that because
they’re borrowing more, that will mean interest rates go
up?BILL It
could well do,
yes.CORIN But you
borrowed tens of billions of dollars, tens of billions of
dollars in government extra. You pushed debt up from about
9% of GDP right up to about 25%, and interest rates
fell.

BILL Well, that was in
extraordinary circumstances, where Reserve Banks around the
world were pumping money into the system in an unprecedented
way.

CORIN Andcredit to
you for doing that, but it’s incredibly scaremongering,
isn’t it, to go out and suggest to people that their
interest rates are going to be higher, when you yourself
can’t rule out that it’ll be higher under
you?

BILL Look, it makes clear the point
we are going to be having declining debt under National.
Under Labour, their will be
higher.

CORIN So will
they.

BILL No, they’re going to have by
their own numbers, $11 billion more debt. Then there’s the
negotiation with New Zealand First or the Greens or maybe
both if they happen to be the government, which will push
debt higher.

CORIN And they have a fiscal
pact, and they’re not going to spend any more than you
are. The surpluses are the same. So as far as the Reserve
Bank’s concerned, it’s not forecasting interest rates to
go up for a couple of years. Why are you out there telling
people they’re going to be higher under
Labour?

BILL Because what government can
do to keep your interest rates low – and this matters a
lot to our households, because a lot of them have borrowed
to get into houses – to keep interest rates low is to
contain our spending and our debt. And we’re on a track to
do that. All the other parties are signalling significantly
greater debt.

CORIN It is just part of a
concerted scare campaign, isn’t it? You haven’t been
able to run on your record. You have run on a negative
campaign. Add this to the $11.7 billion hole, which does not
exist, and you’re just out there to scare voters. Are you
not proud of your record?

BILL I
absolutely disagree. We are very proud of our record. We are
running on our record. But more importantly, we are running
on a plan for the next three years, the next five years to
take advantage of the strength of the New Zealand economy.
The Labour Party and the other parties have the obligation
to answer the questions that New Zealanders are
asking.

CORIN Correct me if I’m wrong,
but the TV ads that you guys have been putting out over the
last few days and changing have been, what, running on your
record? It doesn’t look like it to me. It is negative tax
ads.

BILL Well, and that’s because
that’s what’s in the public’s mind. The public want to
know the answers to those questions about how many taxes and
when. Labour keep changing their mind. It’s absolutely
legitimate. I mean, this is real. This is about cash in
people’s pockets, investment decisions, the decisions to
employ another person, what people can take home at the end
of the week. These are real things. It’s not just some
hypothetical argument.

CORIN Well, like a
$11.7 billion hole? That’s not
hypothetical?

BILL Well, that’s the
best estimate.

CORIN Just a second here.
I’ll move on after this. But are you comfortable
personally as a leader of integrity to be running lines like
$11.7 billion holes, which no economist in this country will
back? I have asked your office to tell me a name. They
haven’t come back to me on that one. Do you feel
personally comfortable with that sort of attack
politics?

BILL Yes, I do, because
that’s the estimate of this weird budget that Labour have
put up. I mean, we have got surpluses, and they’re saying
they want to run up more debt and raise more tax. When you
look at the spending, they are trying to tell us – and
I’ll repeat it again, and everyone agrees this is the case
– they’re trying to tell us there is big chunks of
government over which there’ll be no new policy for the
next three years. No one believes
that.

CORIN Yeah, but no one thinks
there’s that hole. All right. Let’s move on to the water
tax. Research from Radio New Zealand over the last couple of
days suggesting in fact dairy farmers, most of them, 10,000
won’t pay virtually anything in that tax. Are you again
scaring up the farming community on something that is not
going to affect them nearly as badly as you
say?

BILL No, we’re not. The tax was
always on irrigators. Now, they’ve looked at the dairy
farms as also the arable farmers. There is also the
horticulturalists – the numbers that have been used are
the ones that the farmers produce. And what it shows is how
pointless that tax is. Because it’s a tax that randomly
selects one group with a punitive attitude, which Labour
have expressed themselves. They have said if we disagree
with this, we’ll double it. The real issue is the
pollution going into the water and the extensive work and
investment that is going on in New Zealand now to manage
that. We don’t need the tax. It’s a poor tool. And we
want to work with the community that they are provoking.

CORIN All right. Well, Simon Upton,
who’s a former colleague of yours, at the OECD, in his
report made it pretty clear that there’s been a lack of
ambition and that you are taking far too long. And I wonder
whether we’ve got to the point on the tax, because your
government has done nothing for nine years. You’ve had
water forums. You’ve had discussions. Nothing’s
happened. Farmers haven’t had to move, haven’t had to
change their behaviour because you haven’t forced them
to.BILL Well, that
is absolutely wrong. And the media who have been out on this
campaign have actually seen the distress among – not just
the farming community, but the horticulture people, all the
people who work in those industries – because there’s
been five or six years of intensive work. It’s Labour and
The Greens who’ve just discovered the issue of water
quality, are using it quite cynically. There’s intensive
work gone on. And there’s a lot more to do, because the
next stage is to deal with the water quality in our cities,
which is also a challenge.

CORIN Can you
say hand-on-heart that you have not sacrificed the
environment in order to grow our
economy?BILL Yes,
I can, and I can
say--CORIN That’s
not what the OECD and Simon Upton
say.BILL Well, it
looks different from Paris, doesn’t it, than when you’re
living here making a living as a high-value food producer.
We are smart enough in New Zealand to be able to maintain
our position as a high-value food producer with all the
clean green brand and lift our environmental
standards.CORIN The
point he’s making is that a lot of the nitrogen leakage
and this sort of thing into the environment – we haven’t
even felt the full impact of this yet and your government
for nine years has not done enough. It has been too
slow.BILL I
disagree. The science, for instance, of the nitrate flows
into water has only been recently developed. The measurement
system to show progress was finalised just two months ago
because it
took--CORIN And
are all our rivers fenced? Have we fenced all our
rivers?BILL Well,
90%, yes.CORIN Are
you going to do them
all?BILL The
farmers have spent hundreds of millions. Yes. The
regulations will be passed and they will be—and that’s
the result of a whole lot of arguments, including over, you
know, the definition of a slope in the high country, which
all takes time. New Zealand’s in a great position now,
though, and I can tell you this – our rural sector needs
to be profitable to afford the investment to lift the
environmental standards. They’ve been investing in a large
scale and now we can measure progress and there’s full
accountability, annual and statutory environmental
reporting.CORIN It’s
too late, though, isn’t it? Because we’re hearing from
things like business leaders in the Mood of the Boardroom
and they are suggesting that your government hasn’t got
the vision, hasn’t got the energy, if you like, to make
that change on climate change and on the environment, and
that our reputation could be at risk now. We’ve got Al
Jazeera coming, doing documentaries about our water quality.
You’ve put us at
risk.BILL Well, we
had the Labour Party going to go to Coes Ford near
Christchurch, which is meant to be the poster child for all
this. There was too much water. The picture didn’t look
the way it was meant to look, which is just
nonsense.CORIN Are
you seriously going to suggest that the water quality in
Canterbury is somehow OK? Are you going to tell me that Lake
Elsmere is good? That it hasn’t got seriously degraded
over the last 10
years?BILL No.
Lake El—Well, it’s degraded over the last 30 years. What
I can tell you is the serious effort gone in in the Selwyn
River catchment and Lake Elsmere catchment over really
complex, challenging issues. I mean, there is one answer –
slaughter the dairy herd. I suppose that would help. Then
next thing they’ll be talking about how to depopulate
cities because they cause pollution. Well, that doesn’t
make sense. New Zealand can be a
high-value—CORIN
But there’s another way of putting that. It’s
called diversifying your economy – moving into things that
perhaps don’t have that pollution
cost.BILL And
isn’t it interesting? Our exports are diversifying more
quickly and more broadly than they have for a long time -- a
burgeoning IT industry. In fact, you’re going to see a
burgeoning agri-tech industry, because a lot of these
solutions around the nitrate emissions and climate change
– methane emissions -- are technology solutions which
we’re investing internationally with research to carry
out.CORIN It’s
funny because we haven’t heard much from you on that type
of stuff in this campaign – that vision
stuff.BILL Well,
we talk about it all the time. It happens that the campaign
has got pretty focused on the messy policy from Labour on
tax and their proposals about
how—CORIN And
who’s exploited
that?BILL Well,
the public want to know. It’s not a matter of politics. I
mean, this isn’t just about us. This is about people’s
real
livelihoods.CORIN Fair
enough. Look, fair enough, absolutely. We’re certainly not
playing tiddlywinks here and it’s politics, by all means.
But surely you must have thought, what about a positive
campaign? What about trying to highlight the things that you
want to
do?BILL Well, we
have. We’ve had an announcement every day for six weeks,
well-organised, laying out the plans for infrastructure
investment, for support for families, for cheaper GP visits,
for both parents being able to share paid parental
leave.CORIN And
why are all these suddenly coming in the campaign and
haven’t been done a lot
earlier?BILL Because
people need to see the plan – that’s one – and
secondly, actually, we’ve always been a busy government.
In any six week period we’re announcing a whole lot of
things, but certainly it’s sped up for the campaign
because we’ve got a positive plan and actually we know
what needs to be done for New Zealand. We’ve got the team
to do it and that’s why we want a mandate in the
election.CORIN How
worried are you and why is it that we have a number of
hospitals in this country that are turning people away
because they’re overcrowded and they don’t have the
resources to deal with
it?BILL This has
been a long, tough winter and I want to acknowledge the
people on the front line, because the winter peak – which
is always pretty challenging – has lasted longer. Now
we’re right into September and there’s still some very
big days in our hospitals. But, look, we’ve got the
capacity to make the investment that’s needed so we can
handle all the
demand.CORIN You
have now. That’s the point, isn’t it? You have now, but
the population has grown rapidly over the last four or five
years and you haven’t funded it enough, so now we’ve got
people being turned away at
hospitals.BILL We
just put the biggest increase on the 1st of July into health
that it’s had for about 11 years – large-scale
investment into capital
facilities.CORIN And
that’s great, but the point is – and it’s something
that’s come through from Mood of the Boardroom and these
types of things – is that you’ve been too late. You’ve
been too late to recognise these population pressures –
the population pressures on our system – and it’s
getting serious. I mean, people turned away from
hospital.BILL Well,
look, that is a function of the winter peaks, but with
respect to the population, I’ll tell you, there’s one
thing we didn’t quite predict and that is 150,000-plus
Kiwis in the last five years staying home, because we
thought back five years ago the usual pattern would apply.
They stayed home. That’s great. We’re up for it. We can
invest for the kind of growth that’ll give us a population
of 5 million in the next four or five years, the
infrastructure that’s needed for it and the jobs that come
with it. This is a positive, confident country going
somewhere, and that’s why we want to stick to
it.

CORIN Bill English, thank you very
much for your
time.BILL Thank
you.

Please find attached the full
transcript and the link to the interview.

Q+A, 9-10am
Sundays on TVNZ 1 and one hour later on TVNZ 1 +
1.Repeated Sunday evening at around 11:35pm. Streamed
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